Who is BitFlow

BitFlow was founded in 1993 by a group of people that had been in the imaging industry for years. The founders, having spent years developing custom hardware and specialized sub-systems, saw the emergence of the Personal Computer and thought that it could be a real machine vision tool. Moore’s law, dropping memory prices, and ever increasing bus speeds opened up (and still are opening up) new opportunities to apply the PC to imaging applications. All that was needed was a fast and flexible camera interface. BitFlow’s first product was based on the VESA local bus. It was the first frame grabber that didn’t need an on-board display circuit. For the first time, a bus in the PC was fast enough to capture and display video in real time. For a chronological list of BitFlow firsts, click here.

BitFlow’s success has largely been because of its focus on the camera interface slice of the imaging industry. We are an engineering based company. We mostly sell our own engineering; thus, the support you will get will come from the office next to the person who designed the hardware/software you’re using. You may even end up talking directly to the designer. We work hard on solving the difficult interfacing applications, and we work hard to make sure our solutions are flexible enough to solve your problems, no matter how complicated. Yet we strive to make our products easy to use and painless to learn. Finally, if you’re having trouble or are on a tight deadline we will support you better than anyone in the industry.

BitFlow designs all of its hardware and software with the OEM in mind. Everything is designed and built to the highest possible quality standards. Most of our customers are running their equipment 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These are in rugged environments, with constant high speed data requirements. Should something go wrong, we will be there to help get your equipment back on line as quickly as possible. Should you be looking to upgrade your systems, we’ll make the transition to newer and faster equipment as simple as possible.

Another reason customers choose BitFlow is our experience. We have been designing systems that move camera data into computers since the 80’s, always working on the toughest interfacing problems. We understand cameras almost as well as the people who make them. But our experience doesn’t stop there – we understand that our products are only one component in a big system. Our boards have to interact with a variety of signals coming from other equipment and integrate seamlessly into an wide range of applications. We know what it takes to get a machine vision application running on the factory floor, not just in the lab.

Though the VESA local bus is long gone and we are now moving data at gigabytes per second, our founding principles remain. Because of the economies of scale, the PC is, and probably always will be, the most cost effective platform for machine vision applications. All that is needed is to get the data into the machine. BitFlow combines this strategy with high quality standards, deep knowledge of the machine vision industry, a comprehensive understanding of camera interfacing, and the best support in the industry. Give us a call or shoot us an e-mail, we’ll solve your imaging problems so you can go home early.